Breakthrough
Perseverance • Message 2
Brian Heasley • International Prayer Director • 24-7 Prayer
January 14, 2024 • 6:30 pm
Perseverance
Romans 12:1-2 (NIV)
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing and perfect will.
We need to learn the art of perseverance in a culture of immediacy.
immediate culture a culture of immediacy doesn’t lend itself to persistence!
Brian, why not call it the power of preservation, or the discipline of preservation? Well, the longer I go on, I see beauty in preservation.
So we call it the art of preservation.
- It’s that sense of keeping on keeping on! Overcoming,
- Ephesians 6:18 (NIV) … pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.
- We need to become distinguished in prayerfulness.
- “As a citizen your country benefits from your intercession, as a neighbour to others those who live nearby should fall under the shadow of your supplication, as a friend your companions should be bathed in your prayers, as a family member you should always have a flame of prayer burning for your kin.” Charles Haddon Spurgeon
- Genesis 32: 26 (NIV) … “I will not let you go unless You bless me.”
- Identity and walk. He gets a new name and he walks differently after his encounter, after his wrestling, after his persistence.
Persistence does a work in us as well as the people we are praying for.
- Secret History Behind every history that is seen there is always a secret history. Every great revival has people who prayed and don’t get the glory.
- We led Kris to Christ in Ibiza, we got the glow! But his mum had prayed for him for over 30 years!
- My father prays, prevails in prayer, for me every day. It is more likely that he and others like him are the secret to our success as a pose to our own giftedness.
The Lord’s Prayer as an aid to perseverance
The Lord’s Prayer as a help in perseverance
The Lord’s Prayer is the most famous prayer in history, crafted by Jesus Himself.
It can be used as a model and a map.
Why?
“To this day I am still nursing myself on the Lord’s Prayer like a child, and am still eating and drinking of it like an old man without getting bored of it.” Martin Luther
“The Lord’s Prayer correctly understood is one of the high roads into the central mystery of Christian salvation and Christian experience.” N.T. Wright
“To cultivate a deeper prayer life all you have to do is say the Lord’s Prayer, but take an hour to do it.” Timothy Jones
Bible reference
“This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” Matthew 6:9-13 (NIV)
A quick introduction to the Lord’s Prayer
When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he crafted a meticulous, memorable, rhyming prototype. (Ancient Aramaic it rhymes!)
The Lord’s Prayer are words we can actually say – and when we repeat these familiar lines, we echo the words of Christ Himself, alongside billions of Christians throughout time, all over the world.
This prayer given by Jesus can be used in two quite distinct ways:
As a model and a map.
As a model. The Lord’s Prayer serves as the ultimate prototype. It is a condensed liturgical poem clearly intended for frequent repetition. It teaches us what to pray.
As a map. The Lord’s Prayer guides us as we express the things on our hearts. Each line can be applied and expanded in personal conversation with the Father. It teaches us how to pray.
How to pray the Lord’s Prayer
Each phrase of the Lord’s Prayer becomes an invitation to embark upon our own personal adventures of adoration, petition, intercession, confession and spiritual warfare.
- The Lord’s Prayer as a model.
knowing what to pray
It was traditional for rabbinic bands at the time of Jesus to have their own unique creedal prayer.
John the Baptist’s followers seem to have had such a prayer because, when Jesus’ disciples asked, ‘Lord teach us to pray,’ they added ‘just as John taught his disciples.” (Luke 11:1)
They weren’t just asking Jesus for a few good prayer tips.
They were also saying ‘We need a statement of faith!’
This makes the Lord’s Prayer the earliest Christian creed, given to us by Jesus Himself some three centuries before the Council of Nicaea.
As such, it is our primary doctrinal foundation for life and faith, well worth repeating regularly so that its foundational truths can slowly shape our hearts and our minds.
An easy way to build the Lord’s Prayer into your regular routine is to set a daily reminder for midday.
This will be annoying.
That’s the whole point.
It will interrupt your relentless busyness with a reminder to pause and put first things first, to focus for a minute on what you most truly believe.
This is not a new idea.
In fact the Didache which was written in the first century AD instructs the first Christians to pray the Lord’s Prayer ‘three times in the day’ – probably mirroring the three fixed times of prayer in the temple, at 9 am, midday, and around 6 pm.
It is hard to keep praying on and on for something that God does not seem to be giving. Bishop J. C. Ryle wrote, It is far more easy to begin a habit of prayer than to keep it up. . . . Thousands take up a habit of praying for a little season, after some special mercy or special affliction, and then little by little become cold about it, and at last lay it aside. . . . Let us resist this feeling, whenever we feel it rising within us. Let us resolve by God’s grace, that however poor and feeble our prayers may seem to be, we will pray on.
Understandably, some people worry that mechanical recitation might turn into the kind of ‘vain repetition’ that Jesus explicitly warns us against, just before he gives the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6.
Clearly it’s important that we don’t recite the Lord’s Prayer mindlessly, or treat it superstitiously- but rather use this powerful prayer to shape our lives and earth our beliefs.
It helps us to learn the art of perseverance in a culture of immediacy.
Romans 12:1-2 (NIV) Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing and perfect will.
In a culture of immediacy, we need to learn to persevere, this prayer teaches us this.
- The Lord’s Prayer as a map.
knowing how to pray
The Lord’s Prayer is also a map that helps us to pray our own prayers from the heart.
When Jesus said, ‘this then is how you should pray,’ He was telling His disciples to use it more as a guide than a destination.
Many people find prayer difficult. We get distracted and struggle to know what to say.
But praying the Lord’s Prayer is a simple answer to these problems.
Just its first two words, ‘Our Father’ prompt us to pause and pray for our families.
-Father is a term of intimacy…God is close to you…Jesus did not pray “Oh boundless and almighty omniscient Creator beyond the dominion of time and space..” No. “Our Father.”
This was a new concept in Jewish thinking…They believed that God’s name could not be spoken…The Unpronounceable name…
As David Jeremiah writes in Prayer, the Great Adventure... The writers of the Old Testament had a much different concept of their relationship to God than we do today. When the scribes who copied the Old Testament scriptures wrote the word for God, Yahweh, they would throw away their pen, never to use it again. They reasoned that once it had written the word, Yahweh, the pen was disqualified to write anything else.
‘Hallowed be your name’ is an invitation to worship.
‘Let your Kingdom come’ is an opportunity to request help for the particular people, places and situations on our hearts.
‘Give us this day our daily bread’ invites us to pray about our most practical needs.
‘Forgive us our sins’ is a challenge to name the ways in which we have sinned.